Russia’s Arrest of Evan Gershkovich Echoes Soviet Spy Scandal

The arrest of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich in March was the first time a Western journalist had been held on espionage charges in post-Soviet Russia — but it opened a floodgate of memories for Nicholas Daniloff.

Daniloff was working as a journalist in the Soviet Union in 1986 when he was snatched off the streets of Moscow and accused of spying for the United States.

Sudan and the New Age of Conflict

How Regional Power Politics are Fueling Deadly Wars

For the past year, much of the world’s attention has been focused on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and rising tensions between the United States and China over Taiwan—flashpoints that could trigger direct or even nuclear confrontation between the major powers. But the outbreak of fighting in Sudan should also give world leaders pause: it threatens to be the latest in a wave of devastating wars in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia that over the past decade have ushered in a new era of instability and strife. Mostly because of conflicts, more people are displaced (100 million) or in need of humanitarian aid (339 million) than at any point since World War II.

Sudan’s RSF received surface-to-air missiles from Russia’s Wagner: US

Earlier this week, the US declassified information revealing that the Wagner Group was trying to procure weapons for the Kremlin from Africa, specifically Mali.

Russia’s Wagner Group has recently provided Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) with surface-to-air missiles, the US said Thursday as it rolled out new sanctions against the Russian mercenary group.

Afrocentrism is trending in the Maghreb. It’s because Sub-Saharan migrants are rewriting their narrative.

North Africa morphing into a permanent host destination rather than a transit country on the way to Europe for hundreds of thousands of Sub-Saharan Africans is no news. What is new, however, is a rising Afrocentric discourse across social media platforms calling for “reappropriating” North Africa and “chasing” the non-black inhabitants of Morocco, Algeria, Libya, and Tunisia from the continent on the pretense that they are illegitimately colonizing the land.

Libya’s crisis is a tough puzzle to solve for Egypt

The new Turkish assertiveness in Libya and Libya National Army (LNA) General Khalifa Haftar’s strategic retreat from the Western part of the country have created a new equilibrium in the conflict. This is a potential watershed moment that could lead Egypt, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Russia to rethink their support for Haftar and prepare a possible compromise over Libya, especially given the pronunciation of the so-called Cairo Declaration on June 6, 2020. In fact, Haftar is gradually losing internal and external support—from within his own forces to Egypt and the UAE—to the point that no one will likely bet on him again. In this fluid scenario, neighboring Egypt, which has emboldened Haftar since 2014, may play an important new role in order to protect its specific foreign and domestic interests in Libya.

Libya has a mercenaries problem. It’s time for the international community to step up.

A couple of weeks after a state institution in Tripoli was stormed by gunmen and a suicide bomber in 2018, I was sitting in a Tunis café with a friend who had been working in the building on the day of the terrorist attack. Aymenn believed that the suicide bomber was wandering the premises in the run-up to the tragedy and had walked by his desk. He described a beatific smile on the man’s face. “He was drugged up in some way,” Aymenn said. “And this is the thing that kept running through my head: He definitely wasn’t Libyan.”

A moment of opportunity: Can the UN’s new special representative for Libya break the country’s cycle of devolution?

While a precarious ceasefire has uneasily prevailed in Libya since the end of its third bout of civil war in 2020, the country is increasingly showing signs of an eventual relapse into conflict today. This may be why many policymakers were quick to hail as a breakthrough the appointment of Senegalese diplomat Abdoulaye Bathily as the Special Representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG) for Libya and head of the United Nations (UN) Support Mission to Libya in September. After two months into the job, SRSG Bathily may be quickly realizing that Libya’s war never abated, and that it is now simply fought by other means in the halls of the UN and corridors of foreign capitals.